Brandon Drennan
speaker
44 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 10 Sep
Brandon Drennan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Butler Chapel Methodist has been at the center of the African-American community in Tuskegee for decades.
When I arrive, members of the congregation are spending a misty Alabama morning socializing on the steps outside.
But 70 years ago, it served a far more pressing purpose.
In 1957, the Alabama legislature redrew the boundaries of the city of Tuskegee, carving out many black majority areas, denying them the right to vote in civic elections.
Butler Chapel served as an organizing center for a campaign that led to a landmark Supreme Court decision against racial gerrymandering, the redrawing of electoral maps to deny black people elected representation.
now Tuskegee, and dozens of communities like it, find themselves at the center of a new debate over black voting rights.
In 2023, a federal court struck down a congressional district map drawn by the state's Republican legislature.
They ruled at the time that it violated a key clause of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, dividing Black voters in Southern Alabama across three different districts, leaving them a minority in each.
A new map was forced on the legislature, which created two seats where African Americans were in the majority, or close to it.
This is the district that gave America the Tuskegee Airmen, Rosa Parks.
In 2024, Shamari Figures was elected as the first African American to represent Alabama's second congressional district in modern history.
But in April, the Supreme Court issued a new ruling that makes it significantly more difficult to challenge maps based on racial discrimination, leaving Alabama clear to change their map.
Figures now goes into the midterms defending a redrawn white majority seat.
Montgomery, the state capital, is over 60% African American.
Like Tuskegee, it will become part of the newly redrawn 2nd District.
But not all African Americans here oppose the move.
We're walking on generations of generations of history.
Cedric Coley, a Republican Party member, backs his party state government over the interference of federal judges.
I would rather have family disputes with the people of Alabama instead of federal judges stepping in and saying, because your past is racist, we must be racist in the future and create racial maps and box people in racial quotas.
I just don't believe that.
Showing 21–40 of 44 · page 2 of 3
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